Ticket on your fingertips

TECHNOLOGY: Now, an SMS is all that you need to book an air seat.

After movie tickets and cooking gas cylinders, now you can book your airline ticket through an SMS. And it's all so easy "" send an SMS to 6858 or 4242 saying, for example, 'FLY Delhi Mumbai 20 December'.

In 15 seconds, you will get a reply listing top 11 flight options with the lowest fare on top. Another SMS by you saying 'FLY book' will get you a reply promising a call from their executive, this time within 15 minutes. Alternatively, you could visit the website (www.flightraja.com) and complete the formalities. Your ticket is done!

And if all goes as planned, in a few months it will be possible to book a ticket through SMS without any human interface, says Ashwini Kakkar, partner, flightraja.com. According to Kakkar, 6 million mobile connections were added in India in October alone.

"Over 90 per cent of the bookings are single-ticket bookings and we would like to keep it simple for this segment," says Kakkar. For more complicated bookings, involving many passengers and many sectors, users will have the option to go through a call centre.

Says Vinay Gupta, CEO, flightraja.com, "At the moment, the service is routed through a call centre. However, the automated feature will be integrated very soon."

In fact, to make the human interface safer, the company will soon integrate an IVR menu through which the customer can feed in his credit card details using a mobile phone instead of speaking it out to a call centre executive.

Other mobile-based options are also available in the market. India's national carrier, Indian has teamed up with Reliance Infocomm to offer mobile bookings of domestic air tickets on the carrier. This offer though is limited to Reliance India mobile customers only.

Low cost carrier Air Deccan, too, launched a similar service earlier, but the daily bookings have not been that high "" "only 50-100 bookings a day", says Samyukth Sridharan, principal sales and marketing manager, Air Deccan. To access the service, a user needs to first register with Air Deccan.

Ashwini Kakkar claims that flightraja.com is already doing business worth Rs 10 lakh a day and by the end of this fiscal year they aim to get to at least Rs 1 crore a day through the service.

The firm also plans to add more products to the service in the near future, such as cruises, hotel rooms, packages and railway ticketing.

International air tickets and packages are a different proposition all together. For international package trips, travellers require visas which must be obtained offline. To handle this segment, flightraja.com is extending its network of franchisees in different cities from the existing 100 to 700 by March 2007.

The customers will be directed to the closest franchisee by a call centre. "In most cases, people want their packages customised, for which human interface is absolutely necessary," explains Gupta. Time to change.